Blog

Hey everyone -- I'm writing to let you know about some big changes. As you can see, we changed our name to Vae Platform.

On this blog, we've taken the liberty of "rewriting history" -- we've edited old posts to reflect the new name and URL. This isn't for any reason other than making it easier for newbies to follow what's going on without having to learn new name and URLs. I hope you can forgive me for doing it, we're very proud of our past and we weren't trying to erase it.

Furthermore, over the next several weeks, we are going to be rolling out some major changes to our platform that will hopefully be exciting to many of you.

But the biggest changes to come are internal. While we are very proud of the 99.85% uptime record we posted during the last 12 months (despite multiple incidences of server hardware failure), we knew that we could do better.

To that end, we have been totally revamping our server architecture to eliminate as many single-points-of-failure as possible. We're taking quite a radical approach. Rather than maintaining multiple servers in just one location, we are going to be setting up dual copies of our entire infrastructure stack in multiple physical locations. Each location will have independent power, cooling, Internet connections, and copies of your entire website. Even if an entire building drops off the grid, your site will continue entirely uninterrupted.

We are currently rolling out this system gradually to customers. We already have a few sites live on the dual-copy system and so far, so good.

We think that this new infrastructure is so awesome that once we get all our existing customers migrated to it, we are going to market it like crazy. Almost no shared hosting companies do this, and we think that it has the potential to radically shift the baseline for reliability in the shared hosting market.

It's so cool that we think that people will start using our service even if they don't want the CMS or eCommerce but do want reliability on their website. So, we are going to update our plans to include the option to purchase a hosting-only package that doesn't include the CMS. And we're going to push it, hard.

There is nothing you need to do about the name change. At some point, you may see yourself get redirected to vaeplatform.com when trying to log in, but that's it. All URLs will continue to work.

Thanks for supporting us through the first 3 and a half years of our service. We're looking forward to growing even bigger and finding new ways to serve you guys better and better.

We have become aware that PayPal has made changes that *may* impact the
integration between Vae CMS and PayPal.
This applies to people using PayPal Website Payments Standard, PayPal's
no-monthly-fee product.

Specifically, our PayPal standard integration relies on a PayPal
feature called Instant Payment Notification ("IPN"). IPN used to be
enabled by default on all PayPal accounts, so our integration worked
out-of-the-box.

It seems that PayPal no longer enables IPN by default, and in some
cases has retroactively disabled it on some accounts. We're not sure
why. It is supremely annoying that PayPal made these changes without
making any official announcement (at least that we can find), and it is
easy to find reports on the Internet of other people who have been
bitten by this.

If you are using PayPal Website Payments Standard, you should log
into your PayPal account and verify that IPN is enabled.

From the navigation bar at the top, choose "Profile", under the "My Account" tab.

Click the link that says "Instant Payment Notification Preferences".

If you are in the USA, you should be on this URL:https://www.paypal.com/US/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_profile-ipn-notify

If you see a button that says "Choose IPN Settings", you need to
enable IPN. Click that button. Select the option for "Receive IPN
messages (Enabled)". For the URL, enter the following:

http://<yoursite>.vaesite.com/?__v:store_payment_method_ipn=paypal

Replace <yoursite> with the same subdomain that you use to login
to the Vae backstage. So if your site's backstage is
"http://btg.vaeplatform.com", use "btg". Note that this URL uses
"vaesite.com", not "vaeplatform.com". Then click the "Save" button.

You should then see that IPN message delivery is Enabled.

If you see that IPN is already enabled, you do not need to take any action.

Additionally, you should check your PayPal account to make sure
that there are no transactions in there that did not get synced to your
Vae CMS backstage.

We are very sorry that this action is required, however, when supporting 3rd party payment gateways, we will always be at the mercy of any decisions or changes they make.

Please feel free to contact your account manager or support if you have
any questions.

Some customers that use Time Warner Cable in New
York, NY have reported intermittent connection problems and slowness
connecting to sites hosted on Vae.

After an investigation, we have determined this is an Internet
routing problem occurring somewhere between Time Warner's network
(rr.com) and the network of our upstream provider (peer1.net). These
problems seem to be affecting all traffic between rr.com and our
datacenter (Peer 1) in San Antonio, TX. Wordpress is also hosted in the
same datacenter, and is experiencing the exact same problems.

We have confirmed that these problems are not being caused by us and
to the best of our knowledge are isolated to this particular market.

We have reported this to our upstream network providers and to Time
Warner Cable. Unfortunately, there is nothing more we can do at this
time, as the problem is not with our systems.